Welcome to the web-site of the Purcell Plus project

Purcell Plus is an eScience project, based in
the ISMS group at
the Department
of Computing
at Goldsmiths,
University of London, about reconciling the needs of
humanistic scholarship (in this case, a musicological study)
with the demands and constraints imposed by the emerging
eScience technology being brought to bear on those needs.

investigate a methodology for conducting musicological
research in an eScience context by supplementing and
supporting traditional methods rather than threatening or
replacing them

build a computer-based framework for investigating the
knowledge of an expert community about a certain repertory
of music by establishing, recording and analysing
associations between information in the three domains of
notated score, verbal commentary and recorded performance,
and to develop the means whereby scholars can interact with
this information, providing ways to annotate the sources, to
extract knowledge that is meaningful for their study and
present it effectively, without needing to learn the
underlying technology

demonstrate proof of concept of this framework on
Purcell’s Fantazies and In nomines (c1680) as the basis
of enquiry, using a variety of information sources including a
full score-encoding, a specially-commissioned expert
commentary and several audio recordings

show how ICT tools (such as music information retrieval as
represented by the OMRAS 2
project) which operate on musical content (either in the
symbolic/score or digital audio domain) may be used to
produce information that can be expressed as musical
knowledge in a manner that is compatible with humanistic
enquiry. This will be carried on within the context of
established and emerging text-based methods such as those
facilitated by the Semantic Web and other technologies